With over two billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most ubiquitous online service in the world, but it's also a time and data sink that wants to keep you hooked in the name of its advertising profits.
Our guide to permanently deleting or deactivating your Facebook account will take you through backing up your data, checking your advertising profile, disconnecting your account from other services, temporarily disabling it so you can continue to use Messenger and fully deleting your account.
You'll need to be using a desktop web browser to work through these instructions.
Back everything up
You may have put a lot of original content up on Facebook, from photos to essays and diary entries, so you'll probably want to keep your own offline copy after removing your account.
Facebook makes it pretty easy to download all your personal posts and information. Go to your settings page (also accessible via the ▾ drop-down menu to the right of Facebook's top bar) and, under your General Account Settings, a link will invite you to Download a copy of your Facebook data.
Click Start My Archive, enter your password when prompted and confirm that you want to Start My Archive. This can take some time, so an email will be sent to your associated email address when it's ready to download.
Facebook took about 20 minutes to prepare a 90MB archive for us. Once you've received the email, click on the link provided, select Download Your Archive, enter your password and wait for the zip file to download.
Your archive will include everything you've ever posted along with all the metadata associated with your account, but not copies of photos uploaded by others that you've been tagged in.
Disassociate your devices & services
Facebook account deletion and deactivation requests can be cancelled if you log back into the account during the waiting period... which can become very annoying. To avoid this happening by accident, disassociate all devices from your account by going to your Security and login settings, selecting See more from the Where you're logged in section, and selecting Log out of all sessions.
This should log you out of not only all browser sessions, but also all mobile apps. To be on the safe side (and remove temptation), it's worth manually deleting all Facebook apps (including Messenger) from your smartphone while you're at it.
Facebook is widely-used as a Single Sign-On (SSO) service for other sites. Logging into any of these can potentially reactivate a deactivated Facebook account, and deleting your Facebook account could also prevent you from accessing some of the sites you use it to log into.
To see which services are associated with your account, go to the applications tab in your Facebook settings page. Go through and delete all the apps listed in the Logged in with Facebook section using the X symbol on each icon.
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